Productivity

Productivity

Take naps, just not like this

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Today was the 276th day that I got up to work at 5am and I say this not entirely to boast – actually not to boast much at all as it’s only 276 and I’ve been doing this lark for nearly two years now – but rather to bitch about how I still struggle with going to bed. Two hundred and seventy-six times I’ve got up at 5am. I spelt that 276 out in full because it was the start of a sentence.

(If you kill me and threaten my pets, I still could never begin a sentence with a digit. Partly because I’d be dead, you did that in a stupid order. But I might even be relieved at that instead of the certain knowledge I will soon be writing about 1Password again and it is a right bugger finding different words to put in front of it.)

Anyway. Can’t start a sentence with a digit. But also writing it out in full just underlines how many two hundred and seventy-six times is. It is enough that I should surely to god have worked out how to go to bed at such a time or in such a relaxed way that I don’t want to cry when the alarm goes off.

I’m not there yet, I’m not close. But I’m getting close to being close.

And the latest experiment is the nap.

Lately I’ve been starting at 5am and working through to about 7pm and on days that I take a nap around mid-afternoon, that is a doddle. In fact, I work then to 7pm not because oh-I’m-so-busy but because I’m just into the work and not noticing the time going.

So. I’m not the first to say this and it makes me feel so very old saying it, but here you go, here I am: take a nap.

The good things first. For some reason I really enjoy the sense that I’m getting two days out of every one. I mean, I often feel like this morning was yesterday. Or last night was a week ago. It’s partly my body getting confused but also that when this is working, I am flying through things and it feel as if I am getting so much more done that I must be having more time in which to do it.

So yes, you get refreshed and you do more. Great. The energy you get from a nap, terrific.

But.

I can’t go to bed, even though I work at home. Can’t do it. So I have been napping in my office chair. I tell Siri to switch on Do Not Disturb on my iPhone and then to set a timer for 15 minutes, then I sit there with my eyes closed. And on a good day – I’ve now done this a whole four times, I’m an expert – I go into a remarkably deep sleep.

Except.

Lately it’s been a bit cold and my office tends to be the coldest spot in the house, even though I have a heater in there. So just occasionally and not because I am officially 120 years old, I have a blanket. For three days running now, I have pulled the blanket over my head as I sat there napping.

And.

Today it didn’t work.

I sat there, timer running, Do Not Disturb do not disturbing, with a blanket over my head. And that head of mine thought the words “Our little reading group isn’t perfect, I’ve never said it is.” You’re thinking that’s very random and the part of me that wants to appear in any way mysterious is tempted to just shut up now.

Okay, that was never going to happen. This quote is the opening line of a short story I was commissioned to write. It’s called “The Book Groups” (the plural is everything) and I am going to be reading it at an event later this month. It’s written in first-person prose by a (very) unreliable narrator and that means to me it’s dialogue. It’s a script. I am a scriptwriter even in this short story.

Now, I reckon if you’ve read this far then you’re in, you’re committed, you’ve invested time here and I can tell you something those lesser people who don’t read to the end of articles will never know. It’s this. I am very proud of how often actors have told me that learning my scripts is easy because the dialogue is good. It’s natural and real and it is what the characters would say. I am very proud of that. I recognise that if you don’t happen to be a scriptwriter you might not feel the import I do, but I am and I really do.

And, whisper it, I think I agree now.

Because I can perform The Book Groups. Not read it, I don’t have to read it anymore, I can perform the entire story from memory and in character.

This is relevant because of what happened in the nap today. I sat there with the blanket over my head, I mostly-silently performed The Book Groups, practicing away. I looked like I was furniture that had a drape cloth over it and was moving like a ghost in response to unseen and unheard drama.

I looked like a prat and a half of full-cream milk.

And Angela was working at home today.

We are obsessed with productivity.

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Not me. Nooooo.

Even for those who are not constantly bombarded with work demands outside the office, the ubiquity of information processing presents a temptation to be on call at all times. Our world has become an ambient factory from which there is no visible exit and there exists an industry of self-help technologies devoted to teaching us how to be happy workers. “Is information overload killing your productivity?” asks a representative business story. The answer is to adopt yet more productivity strategies. The labour of work is thus extended to encompass the labour of learning how to keep up with your work (specialised techniques, such as “Inbox Zero”, to manage the email tsunami) as well as the labour of recovering from your work in approved ways.

“Exercise,” advises one business magazine feature. “It makes you more productive.” In a perfect world, you would be getting exercise while you work—standing desks and even treadmill desks are sold as magical productivity enhancers. In the future, we’ll enjoy the happy possibility of carrying on with our work while out running, thanks to “wearable computing” devices such as Google Glass, which has the potential to become the corporate equivalent of the electronic tags that record the movements of criminals.

Productivity is Taking Over Our Lives – Steven Poole, New Republic (13 December 2013)

Notice the title there: “Productivity is taking over our lives”. That’s the title as billed by the website New Republic but if you go to that site and to that article, the title you see is different. It’s “Against the Insufferable Cult of Productivity”. More, New Republic is actually reprinting an article that first appeared in The New Statesman where it was called “Why the cult of hard work is counter-productive”.

Are headline writers paid on an hourly rate?

Could the time you spend writing so many headlines be more productively spent on – um, well, okay, maybe the article has a teeny point. Little bit. Read the full piece.

Don’t look at what you’ve got to do, look at what you’ve got

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This is really interesting. It’s crouched behind whatever the opposite of a come-on title is – it’s called The Power of Asset-Based Approaches – but it is fascinating. The core of it, or at least the core that immediately appeals to me, is that taking stock of what and who you’ve got produces better results than you all bitching about what problems you have to solve.

Do you know, when you put it that way…

Writer Donnie Maclurcan puts it differently:

The underlying message is that when we start by exploring people’s strengths, we value people as human beings. When applied to community development, the asset-based approach is one of the most powerful ways to mobilize for social change because it proposes that everyone has something to offer and therefore everyone is needed. It shifts thinking to building from opportunities rather than responding to problems, and in the case of group processes it reduces the kinds of participant fears that often lead to unhealthy behaviours (such as power plays and passive aggressive behaviour). Equipped with such knowledge, groups can then move forward in a respectful, highly productive way with the work that attracted their member’s involvement in the first place.

The asset-based principle is also transferable to project planning. When you design a project that starts by highlighting its participants’ strengths, user uptake rapidly increases. Similarly, an article that starts with positives or neutral facts will draw-in and retain more readers than one that starts with a controversial opening statement, even if that controversial statement appears later on in the article. Highlighting this phenomenon in the real world, the U.K. sustainability communications agency Futerra compiled a 2009 report demonstrating just how important it is for climate organizations to begin their arguments and reports by ‘selling the sizzle’, i.e., focusing on what’s going well.

The Power of Asset-based Approaches – Donnie Maclurcan, Post Growth Institute (9 September 2014)

Read the full piece, I recommend it. And thanks to Angela Gallagher for the heads up.

Video: David Allen on stress-free productivity

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Small thing. I’ve said video up there in the headline but actually, whisper it, this isn’t really about bringing you that video. Which is good because it may not be here.

It should be. Take a look right between this paragraph and the next.

Was there a video? If there was, and your name is Adam – and you have the most brilliant job title I’ve ever seen – then hello Adam, Happiness Engineer, all seems to be working now. If there isn’t a video but you are Adam, um, hello.

And whether there is a video or there isn’t, if your name isn’t Adam, then hello you too. How’ve you been?

Pardon? Microsoft embracing Dropbox storage

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This removes another block to my using Microsoft Word for iPad. Up to now – and remember that isn’t very long, it’s not a huge time since Word and Office first came to iPad – you have had to use OneDrive for storage. That’s Microsoft’s equivalent of Dropbox and iCloud and it’s convenient if you’re an Office 365 subscriber. If you’re not, it isn’t. Not so much. Certainly not as handy as being able to save and open documents directly with Dropbox.

I’d have said Dropbox was an obvious route to go. But I’d also have said Microsoft would never do it. And the result was I never even thought about it enough to write it. So this was a surprise:

Microsoft and Dropbox are teaming up today to more closely integrate Dropbox into Office. The surprise partnership will benefit Dropbox users who use Office across desktop, mobile, and the web as Microsoft’s productivity suite will soon become the standard way to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files stored on Dropbox storage. Office for iPad will benefit the most, with an update coming in the following weeks that will allow Dropbox users to link their account directly to the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint iPad apps.

Dropbox and Microsoft form surprise partnership for Office integration – Tom Warren, The Verge (4 November 2014)

This isn’t just that you can fiddle your way into sometimes using Dropbox, it is that you can seemingly even choose to skip OneDrive completely.

Now, if only Microsoft would sell a version without an annual subscription. Read the full piece.

That was October 2014…

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Previously… I write this list of what I’ve done in the month. I do it because I used to write a monthly report and had to do things in order to have anything to say. This helped me greatly. So I report to you. Here’s last month’s but here’s the a-little-better October 2014. Not as much writing as I’d have liked but I’m surprised how many events I ran.

Well, I say I ran them. Really everybody else did the work and I just got the best seat in the house, so.

Writing: approximately 58,049 words
Four guest blogs for Inkspill plus scripting and shooting an intro video with writing exercise (2,700 words)
Approximately 10,000 words on new book
Radio Times radio preview of the Free Thinking Festival (100 words)
Wrote poem “My Curse” (100 words or so)
Wrote 128 posts on The Blank Screen (40,610 words)
Wrote 5 posts on Self Distract (4,539)

Events
Produced and chaired Steven Knight event at the BBC Drama Village for the Writers’ Guild and the Royal Television Society
Produced and ran The Blank Screen all-day workshop in Birmingham for the Federation of Entertainment Unions
Attended the Royal Television Society Midlands Awards gala dinner as a drama judge
Ran Burton Young Writers’ group session
Ran a radio writing workshop for South & City College
Performed my short story, The Book Groups, to the Combrook Reading Group
Depped for Polly Wright leading a reader/writer group (second of two)
Met with BBC to discuss general projects plus liaising with RTS and Writers’ Guild
Attended countless events at Birmingham Literature Festival
Attended Ajax, directed by Polly Tisdall in Oxford
Appeared on Poetry Please by way of the Birmingham Literature Festival
Attended Write On Young Writers’ group meeting
Attended Solomon and Marion at the Birmingham Rep (for which I wrote programme notes)
Attended Of Mice and Men at the Birmingham Rep (for which I wrote programme notes)
Attended Cucumber Theater: Sorry to See You Go at the Birmingham Rep (for which I wrote a sentence of the notes)
Interviewed Jo Bell for book
Attended BBC launch of Children’s Chaplains

Pitches:
11 (3 successful)

Other:
Officially made Regional Representative of the Writers’ Guild in the West Midlands
Arts Council funding discussions and meetings
Submitted my first Arts Council England funding application
Created MailChimp account for Cucumber Theater Group and sent their first mailshot
Briefed Cucumber Theatre folk on using Mailchimp and handed over the keys
Was handed the keys to the Royal Television Society Midlands Centre’s social media: have tweeted news for them daily since
Was handed the keys to the Writers’ Guild West Midlands social media; have Facebooked news for them daily since
Devised a new business in a morning, publicised it in the afternoon and got first clients by the evening (The Blank Screen mentoring/coaching)
Worked with Room 204’s Rivka Fine
Graphics work for Cucumber Theatre
Moved The Blank Screen to using Drafts 4 for writing text and Pixelmator for image editing

Is Inbox Zero for Sociopaths?

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No.

The campaign by productivity experts to convince us that all successful people have achieved Inbox Zero is directly at odds with our very human desire and need to stay in touch and sustain our relationships. We need to ask ourselves if the guilt we feel for not having a totally empty inbox is worse than the guilt we feel for treating heartfelt communiqués from those we love as just another task we have to complete.

Which is all to say that you should maybe feel a little horrible for not responding to those long emails. Keep them around until you have time to really respond to them—even if takes months. Jot a brief note to the sender letting them know it might be a while, but you will respond.

Is Inbox Zero for Sociopaths? -Melissa Kirsch, Cafe

Read the full piece.

But, seriously, what? I like – no, I love – long emails, I just don’t see that equals my having to keep them in my inbox. Takes all sorts.

Do something else at 2pm

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Writer JD Arbuckle has a longish piece about studying your habits and rhythms in order to improve your productvity. It’s interesting but this is the bit that grabs me:

Move into a completely different task between 2PM – 3PM. Most people suffer from a mid-afternoon crash during this time. The worst thing you can do during this hour is try to grind through the crash. Instead, head to a local restaurant and meet a friend. Switch into workout clothes and run the lake. Go run errands and pick up groceries. After this break, you will return to finish the rest of your work completely re-energized and focused (If you haven’t already finished everything between 9-2)

5 Strategies for Maintaining Peak Performance Levels – JD Arbuckle, Conquer Today (12 June 2014)

Read the full piece.

RS, I? Why you should eat Resistant Starch breakfasts

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I thought starch was something people used on clothes. But Time magazine has a short piece about why these foodstuffs do you good for keeping your slim. I am slightly more interested in how they affect your energy; this is on my mind right now because I went out for breakfast about six hours ago and I am still feeling sluggish and full.

You know that eating breakfast jump-starts your metabolism. But did you realize that certain a.m. choices can crank up your fat-burning even more?

The key: eating a breakfast that’s high in Resistant Starch (RS). Found in foods like bananas and oats, RS actually signals your body to use fat for energy.

Start your day skinny with these fat-burning meals,.

The Best Fat-Burning Breakfasts – Shaun Chavis, Time (29 October 2014)

There follows a few short recipes, all taken from this book, The Carb Lovers Diet Cookbook by Ellen Kunes. Read the full piece.